What Happened to ShiftUp's Last Gacha Game: Destiny Child?

before the time of Nik was a dark time indeed I was still stuck farming artifacts in genshin pulling for SSRS without a pity system in fgo shift up the developer team behind Nik had already published their first gotcha game prior to gracing this world with our beloved one-handed shooter by the name of Destiny Child which was relatively well known in the industry though you had to dig a little to find it last year in 2023 the studio announced every player's dreaded three letters e oos end of service so what happened why did a relatively small but well respected entry in the gacha community end prematurely since I consider Nik as my main game on the channel I wanted to find out how the same developers that created this masterpiece were also responsible for some of the most impressive breakthroughs in gacha game history in this video I'm going to try and outline the details of how Destiny Child Rose and fell as well as why It ultimately shut down my name is psyche and let's get started now for full disclosure I actually tried out the game last summer after the end of service announcement but I didn't have extensive knowledge of the game prior to that so I can't speak about Destiny Child's quality when it comes to elay game content and builds since the game can't be played normally anymore some of the footage shown are captured by other online users and all reference links will be in the description Destiny Child first launched in Korea in late October of 2016 it will launch its Global servers 2 years later in December 2018 the game was first co-developed with shift up as their first major project and was published by lion games who was also responsible for managing the Japanese servers shift up would fully take over as the service provider for the game in 2019 until the end of the game service in 2023 let's start with a simple question what's destiny child about well the story Falls a lowly ranking demon from The Infernal realm that wishes to live in the human world with no Ambitions in life and wants to live as a modern-day otaku that's scrapes by life at a convenience store the description is so realistic it's scary one day he accidentally signs a contract to participate in the arch fiend contest in the infernal realm to compete to become its next ruler with the aid of three succubi Mona Lisa and Davi who seems pretty deliberately named the hero sometimes dubbed the master goes on the journey to become stronger recruit powerful demonic beings known as Childs to his side and participate in tournament to become the next ruler of the infernal realm surprisingly the main protagonist is fully voiced so it's quite different from the voiceless Commander from Nik what I will argue as the game's main selling points where it's a free-to-play friendly progression model and the ability to make some really goodlooking characters Destiny CH is known for its use of live 2D animation which at the time was still a fairly relatively new technology most SCA games at the time didn't have it so for people in 2016 it was pretty jarring to see the onscreen characters actually moving no sure the early models don't move as naturally as the later ones with some Sprites just dragging pixels back and forth but since shift up has had a lot of practice you can see the models becoming more and more detailed and with more natural movements as the game progressed the game was presented in portrait mode on a mobile device with only certain modes allowing you to go wide screen you can change it to landscape mode but it's clear that just like Nik it's designed with portrait mode in mind and unless it's blown up on a tablet or PC the display can be a bit hard to see how the game play worked was that you would form a team of five Childs and go into combat they would all periodically do a normal attack and you can either press the portrait of a child for their skill or drag it up for their slide skill when enough time elapses you can also activate a child's Drive skill where you do a sort of a qte to tap the screen when the line is close to the dot and the more accurate you are the more damage it does and the more of the fever gauge it fills up if the fever gauge is full you can enter a state called fever time where you can freely tap on any of your child's portraits to deal damage I don't believe there's a way to specifically Target an enemy and most levels will have multiple waves so you want to save your fever time when it matters most you can see what looks like the base template for nik's gameplay the portrait mode display the 5unit team configuration and their fever gauge or Full Burst state that does more damage if by description you thought the gameplay for a Destiny Child looks simple that's because it is too simple almost you can even toggle the game to be played on auto for two times speed where you don't even need to interact with the screen this was actually a common complaint why players couldn't get into the game it just felt rather boring if you compared it to other modern gacha titles you don't see the uh assets like in Nik and just a portrait of each character with the occasional Sprite popping in every now and then of course I don't have nearly enough experience to get into the details of gameplay and it's not possible for anyone else to either though there are quite a number of aspects when it came to upgrades and team building you could equip a piece of weapon armor and accessory which gave more stats you can also equip another piece of gear called The Soul CA which is kind of like craft Essences in fgo where they're beautifully Illustrated and provides a further boost of power and later a puppet that does the same you can upgrade a unit skills unlock nodes for their backstory and additional perks and can even upgrade a child to the next tier so a five-star can be upgraded to a six-star though by default six stars don't exist they have to be upgraded in this fashion to become one you might also be a bit confused by this point by the sheer amount of stats and information thrown at you and this is another aspect of the game that new players had difficulty digesting the game has evolved over the years with the devs adding more and more features there's nothing wrong with complexity in a game but the issue with a lot of these lesser known titles is that there's no clear-cut guide that you can follow unless you really dig for it Destiny Child was definitely more of a team buing game rather than a mechanically demanding game like aiming a gun in Nik when I tried it last summer I just used whatever the game gave me and did the story as much as I could there were so many units to learn and I couldn't find an upto-date guide for team building even if you looked at the main menu the amount of buttons and tabs was almost overwhelming again I have no problems with complexity in games and I'm sure it does get pretty deep if you play the game for long but overloading newer players with info is not going to help with retention Destiny Child was also known as the crown jewel of free-to-play gacha games just like Nik shift up was also extremely generous with the rates and free materials from what I gathered it's even to a more extreme degree than Nik the base chance for a five star was 3% though I'm not entirely sure if this is true that's the rate I saw when I played almost close to end of service so maybe they switched up the rules a little bit if we assume that's true it's only 1% less than n case rate but 3% is still considered on the generous side for gacha standards there's also no units that are limited except for the collab ones so just like Nik everyone was available in the standard pool not just gotcha rates but it was also relatively easy to get most of the equipment available to max out any upgrades and get most of the skins that weren't behind a microtransaction you could also do low Rarity summons with coins and there was a separate Banner for so cardas with different rates this element will prove to be both the game's strength and weakness on one hand hand players praise shift up for their generosity stated when free-to-play players can get majority of the content released in the game for no cost the other side criticized the devs that they were being too generous since there's less incentive to whale in Destiny Child versus Nik some even calling shift of incompetent since they didn't know how to monetize their game and every single life service Game Dev knows that you need whales in order for the game to survive there has to be a compromise between the freeo playay and the Wailing experience that both sides are happy with what they have the whole point of wailing is to gain an advantage in competitive elements like PVP and raids so if even free-to-play players can get in on the action then what's the point of wailing there's also the hot spring mode where you can put your characters in The hotring and give them gifts once you reach a certain Bond level you can unlock their hotring illustration which is normally hidden behind a cloud of steam the worst enemy of any anime fan there's also some other modes and mini gamess but I think you get the idea at this point the game had a small but dedicated community but it wasn't raking in the profits or popularity everything went well for the game there was a heavy focus on fan service but most players played the game for that exact reason you can clearly see the team improving their live 2D rigging and characters being more detailed now armed with years of experience shift of would launch their next major gacha project Nik in November of 2022 just a few weeks after the sixth anniversary of Destiny Child Yuki would go on to become a smash hit surpassing any expectations the team had in 2023 the Korean server had a total of over 600 Childs and over 500 on the global server everything seemed fine except one summer day out of the blue right after a major content patch the CEO of shiftup announced that destiny child will be reaching end of service on September 21st 2023 there was no concrete reason stated why but there's a number of theories thrown around by rough estimates Destiny Child pulled around close to $100,000 in Revenue per month while it's definitely on the lower end in terms of of Revenue it was enough to keep the lights on however with the unprecedented success of Nik one had to wonder why bother putting in all this effort with designing new characters and maintaining the game when you can put the same amount of effort into Nik and earn 200 times more profit from a business perspective they also wanted to allocate more Workforce to develop their new console game Stellar blade so it's theorized that they wanted more of the team to invest into that project instead there's also the speculation that they wanted to please shareholders and since Nik is published by level infinite which is 10 cents international branch it wouldn't be the first time a publisher might forcefully pull the plug on a game just because doing okay is not good enough regardless the game was scheduled to end services in September which is just 1 month before the 7th anniversary and 10 months after nik's launch all servers were shut down and to my knowledge the story would never reach a conclusion this also meant that Global players would not be able to see Korean content that hasn't released yet the announcement also promised a memorial update where with a code you can view all the Childs and other equipment you collected while playing this is incredibly generous as they weren't obligated to deliver this most Life Services in and there's just nothing left for those that stuck around you can still download the game today and upon opening it it will ask for a code however it doesn't actually have to be your code since the game is offline and no one can alter your account with plenty of whale accounts that were shared online you can still view every single character that was released every single costume and Soul C up the hotring is still available and the entire main story events and Side Stories are readable this is how I was able to obtain some of the footage for this video so the fact that the memorial update exists at all still speaks volume about shift Up's generosity it was pretty jarring for those still playing at the time and after trying out Nik some even said that it just wasn't the same as Destiny Child was just way too generous with rewards and pull rates I was blown back by this as someone coming from playing genin and fgo Nik felt like heaven the 4% SSR rate and being able to get almost every unit in the game as a low spender is not something typically seen in the gacha game because I almost want to ask Destiny Child fans have you tried playing a gacha game with 0.8% rate up SSR chance with no pity system have you tried grinding every day for perfect artifacts that don't exist if you ask me the destiny child players were so spoiled that they didn't know just how bad some other gacha games had it despite what you might think there were many fans that didn't see Nik favorably after all if Nik hadn't become such a juggernaut in the gotcha industry there's a chance that destiny child might have continued here's something interesting I wanted to share I'm also a pretty avate fan of Rhythm games one of the first I played was a game called M Das the game has a DLC where you buy it at a fixed price and you will get access to every song in the game including ones that will be released in the future considering there's over hundreds of songs and levels that will open up for only $ 20 to $30 this was an amazing deal and players were overwhelmingly in support of the offer of course when the devs try to raise the prising by introducing a separate package the game was review bombed and they eventually roll back the announcement the lesson here is that if a developer of a game is too generous then that will become the player base's expectation they expect the game to continuously be generous for the rest of the development cycle if a game was stingy say like genin then if they suddenly gave out 10 free PS or roll out a much needed quality of life change after years without then players are going to thank their Saints but still know that the amount of player appreciation is not going to be a consistent thing if a game is too generous and they try to plow back a feature or monetize more egregiously then they're going to get a lot of negative feedback shift up couldn't just add more monetization to Destiny Child is that would upset the small enough Community it had nikay marked A New Beginning for shift up it's clear that they learned from their mistakes it was a way to redesign what previously wasn't working there are reasons for wailing in N the UI is not overwhelming for new players the gameplay is more engaging there are ways for low Spenders to enjoy the game via the 30-day Supply pack and battle pass and even for free to play you can still obtain a good portion of the game's characters while obviously not on the same level as Wales Destiny Child was truly an exception in the gacha industry and it's my personal belief that its generosity was one of the major factors that ultimately led to its downfall on September 21st 2023 for Destiny Child fans it was the end of an era but for Nik fans it was a Thursday lastly there's also some discussion surrounding a possible collab event with Destiny Child and Nik I mean they still own the IP so it's not completely out of the question but since the whole point of collabs is to advertise another franchise it doesn't really make too much sense to advertise a game that just can't be played anymore even if it's done it will be purely out of respect for their previous game anyways I would like to know how you think about Destiny Child or if you played it yourself I might do more Goa reviews just like this one or going over a game that reached its end of service and trying to explain what happened let me know if you enjoyed this video and as always have fun with the [Music] game

Channel: Pseychie

Views: 54,039

Keywords: NIKKE, NIKKE Goddess of Victory, gacha, gacha game, destiny child, destiny child end of service

Id: Ker9A2rkvuA

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024